Will artificial intelligence help — or hurt — medicine?

A doctor's job is to help patients. With that, very often comes lots and lots of paperwork. That's where some startups are betting artificial intelligence may come in.

NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel has been looking into the use of AI in the medical field and he brings us an age old question: Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

Dereck Paul hopes the answer is yes. He's a co-founder of the startup Glass Health. Dereck was an early skeptic of chatbots. "I looked at it and I thought it was going to write some bad blog posts ... who cares?" But now, he's excited about their experimental feature Glass AI 2.0. With it, doctors can enter a short patient summary and the AI sends back an initial clinical plan, including potential tests and treatments, Dereck says. The goal is to give doctors back time they would otherwise use for routine tasks.

But some experts worry the bias that already exists in the medical system will be translated into AI programs. AI "has the sheen of objectivity. 'ChatGPT said that you shouldn't have this medication — it's not me,'" says Marzyeh Ghassemi, a computer scientist studying AI and health care at MIT. And early independent research shows that as of now, it might just be a sheen.

So the age old answer to whether the benefits outweigh the risks seems to be ... time will tell.

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This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Nicolette Khan. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.